Ethics, Society and Politics: Themes from the Philosophy of Peter Winch
About this ebook
Peter Guy Winch is most famous for his early work on the philosophy of the social sciences. His On the Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (ISS) generated controversy within both philosophical and social scientific circles. In that work and subsequent publications Winch argued against the presupposition that social relations could be understood using the conceptual tools of the natural sciences. Winch would later describe ISS as a 'young man's book' and would come to regret the reputation it garnered him - a mixture of roughly equal degrees fame and infamy. Alongside his work on the philosophy of social sciences, Winch was an interpreter and exegete of Wittgenstein. He also published a ground-breaking study of the philosophy of Simone Weil, entitled Simone Weil: The Just Balance. Winch also published numerous essays on issues in ethics, political philosophy and the philosophy of religion, and at his death was working on a book manuscript on the problem of political authority.
About the author
Lynette Reid is associate professor in the Bioethics Department at Dalhousie University, Canada. She completed a PhD on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus with Winch at Illinois in the mid-1990s. She works on ethical, political, and philosophical issues in public health, focusing on cancer screening, the normative significance of health inequalities, and preferential access in universal health care syste s.
